calvingodfrey

[calvingodfrey]

Hey Calvin! I see your food tours in Saigon on your Squarespace site and it's asking me to pay for something that I'm a little confused about. We are two people coming to Saigon 11/19-21 and we'd love to do a tour, and my friend Kelly highly recommended you. So here are my questions: is it $100/tour or $100 per person? How long is the tour? And saving the best for last, are you available any of those three days? Hope to hear from you!

Hi!

I’m so sorry but I’m in LA making a show about street food in Saigon until December!

[calvingodfrey]

Many Tets ago, a friend stumbled into Ta Nung as a slender backpacker in search of a waterfall. He found the waterfall and a kind of Eden — just 18 winding kilometers away from the Central Highlands resort town of Da Lat.

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Thousands of conscripted Vietnamese and ethnic minority laborers died building the “hill station” for the French, who wrongly believed the cool weather would cure the fevers killing them by the boatload. Instead, its ornamental lakes proved ideal breeding grounds for malarial mosquitoes.

[calvingodfrey]

During his initial visit, my friend endeared himself to a married couple who lived in a low tile home overlooking a valley of rolling coffee farms.

Uncle Happy (Chú Vui) had spent most of his life shuttling troops around the country in Russian trucks. Sharp and muscular, even in his 50s, he maintained a whimsical fondness for the road.

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In the intervening years, a concrete hydropower station replaced the falls, but the village remained otherwise unchanged — an ideal place to spend a week under the pines, watching bright yellow pollen tumble through the sunlight.

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Thuy had managed to keep Chú Vui in town long enough to raise and their daughter.

Money remained tight and their girl (now in her final year of college) wouldn’t be home for the holidays. We reckoned the presence of two shiftless white men would lighten the mood.

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But that would prove a difficult task.

Days before our arrival, someone had murdered a pair of elderly chicken farmers in a most grizzly fashion. 

No one in the close-knit farming community ventured to guess who would do such a thing, making the crime almost supernatural. Di Thuy informed us, with an apologetic finality, that this Tet would be strictly vegetarian.

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As the Lunar New Year neared, we helped tidy the house and ready the altar. We drove up red roads into the hills and lay under impossibly blue skies and watched cotton clouds float along as we drifted in and out of sleep.

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Di Thuy laid out the competing theories about the killings over a lunch of lettuce, none of which would prove true.

We lay about on the tile floor until Uncle Happy built a bonfire that drew neighbors like so many moths. 

We huddled together around the flames and said nothing about the dead.

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For a time, the men sipped Diet Coke and tea.

By New Year's Eve, the husbands of Ta Nung launched a quiet revolt against the ban on fun. Warm cans of beer began falling from jacket sleeves; plastic bags of rice wine popped out of pockets.

We piled drunk onto motorbikes and went from house to house in our crispest clothes handing envelopes of money to children who immediately threw it into card games to find out just how lucky it was.

Soon enough, pork returned to the meals we ate on the floor.

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The pious women of the town, primped to impossible beauty, simply drew their mouths and retired early.

And then the chicken feasts began.

We washed down the birds, one after another, with cases of beer in shacks wallpapered with old calendar pages — as though the days meant nothing at all.

With Tet restored to Ta Nung, we left.

[calvingodfrey]

Months later, the town's residents packed the local People’s Committee building to see the killer: a 23-year old hired hand named Lu Van Quy.

Quy had asked the old couple to borrow some money ahead of the holiday. When they refused, he picked up a hatchet and knocked the old man down. Then he called the old woman out and knocked her down too.

After stealing their old phones, he robbed them both of less than $24.

The court sentenced the 23-year-old to death, all over some lucky money.

[calvingodfrey]

The weirdness began as it so often does, with an unsolicited email.

Dear Calvin, We are the group of five people — food and travel journalists and vietnamese restaurant owner from Moscow, Russia. We’ve been travelling through the Vietnam from South to North the whole month, researching vietnamese food and culture. Now we arrived at our final destination in HCMC and we want to share with you our own pho, talks, local beer, music and pleasue. Please, bring some vietnamese food or products that you think we definitely have to try: that can be something small and made by yourself. And of course you can invite your colleagues and friends who are also interested.

The sender, Ника, sent her best regards and signed her message Lao Lee & Sputnik.

[calvingodfrey]

I'd just quit my job and begun the process of moving to Singapore. 

I told myself that solving food mysteries was less important than, say, buying medical insurance or burning my things.

Still, some part of me knew I’d go to the fucking dinner and I spent about an hour wandering through the tight alleys of Phu Nhuan before I found the house.

[calvingodfrey]

My hosts, Ivan and Nika, had hung a banner over the doorway, while the rail-thin owner of Lao Lee (a waterfront Quán Nhậu for Moscow!) floated in and out of a kitchen full of Vietnamese club DJs and their moms.

Ivan and Nika saw my byline in the Lucky Peach, the magical food rag that provided a kind of group home for weird and rambling stories about Chợ Lớn's lady hog butchers, Củ Chi's brown rice noodle cult and Big Daddy 7, the king of the Trường Sơn mountains.

News broke that very afternoon that the Lucky Peach would soon print it's last issue—just as Ivan and Nika decided to launch a 'zine called Sputnik.

[calvingodfrey]

Some three hours after I arrived, the head chef assembled her puzzled Vietnamese guests and began to give a heartfelt speech about the significance of her journey before presenting a cabbage and mushroom-based noodle soup she called “vegan pho” to a starving and distinctly drunk eating audience.

Also served: banana-leaf wrapped delectables (banh it, nem chua, cha lua, etc.) bought off an old man on a bicycle and a kicking canh chua prepared by one of the old women dragged along by her stunning DJ daughter.

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When we all sat together on newspaper, the bullet-headed cop clearly dispatched to investigate the bizarre goings-on shuffled in with an iPhone and his cigarettes rolled up in the leg of his pants.

The Russians didn't bother to ask who he was before passing him a bowl of pho and gesturing to an empty spot in the circle.